Metro Exodus GDC 2018 Tech Demo with NVIDIA RTX Real-Time Ray Tracing

Unlike other ray-tracing tech demos at GDC, this more conservative level of RT seems doable on upcoming high-end consumer graphics cards in 2018, not only in benchmarks but probably in-game. It's also apparently running at 4K / 60fps, at least it was uploaded as such. The other RT tech demos were running at 30fps and limited to 1080p.

http://www.4a-games.com.mt/4a-dna/2018/3/22/nvidia-reveals-collaboration-with-4a-games-on-rtx-technology-at-gdc-2018

NVIDIA Reveals Collaboration with 4A Games on RTX Technology at GDC 2018

We are happy to announce our collaboration with NVIDIA using RTX technology to include real-time ray traced Global Illumination in our upcoming game, Metro Exodus.

During the NVIDIA press conference at GDC 2018, NVIDIA and Microsoft announced a graphic technology that video game developers have been waiting for. At 4A Games, we have always strived to be at the cutting edge of technology with the 4A Engine, and we’ve had a long standing relationship with NVIDIA that has always enabled us to achieve that goal.

Rather than create a theoretical tech demo to showcase this new RTX technology running in the 4A Engine, we wanted to explore a practical application in an in-game scenario that our fans could directly benefit from. This demonstration shows RTX implemented and running in Metro Exodus, on our proprietary 4A Engine, using actual game content - you might recognise this environment from our 2017 E3 trailer! We have utilized true raytracing to render both Ambient Occlusion and Indirect Lighting in full realtime, in a practical in-game scenario. The demo can be seen running at NVIDIA’s booth at GDC 2018.

“For many years, proper global illumination has been the holy grail of real-time rendering. There have been various solutions in the past, but all have had to compromise in some critical area.

Offline pre-rendered GI offers a great visual target, but sacrifices flexibility in production, in-game dynamics, and uses a lot of memory. Prior realtime solutions were always limited by distance of light propagation, lack of data behind objects or screen edges and produced visual issues like leaks or unnatural lighting.

But this is the point where hardware steps in bringing truly scale-independent ambient occlusion by allowing brute force tracing of multiple rays from each pixel several hundreds of meters each frame.

Dynamic lighting has always been a priority for the Metro series. We intentionally avoided pre-baked data and were relying on real-time methods to build our visuals to support more flexible, dynamic gameplay. Global Illumination is highly important for the proper "grounding" of objects and readability of shapes, which in turn create improved ease of navigation and enhanced visual impact for the player.

Previously, we had utilized a mix of several custom-made systems to satisfy our hungry demand for dynamic content of varying scale. Now we are able to replace it with one single system that covers all our needs and outputs the quality of offline renderers.” - 4A Games’ Chief Technical Officer, Oleksandr Shyshkovtsov.

The Metro video is not raytraced.

It's not fully raytraced, it using raytracing for Global Illumination and ambient occlusion.

God this game looks rough. Hope this is not the final build.

The game looks rough? Gamers these days.

Nothing really popping out at me that spells out the benefit of enabling this, before and after shots might help. As is I don't see what the benefit is other than Nvidia paying devs to use their game breaking and framerate destroying gameworks code.

Hope it is not tanking performance like hairworks

^ ^ This

Gee, is it just me, or are the textures underwhelming?

I do like when developers get super nerd with their details. it's that drive that pushes graphics forward. Hopefully that same attention has been directed on the game play ;)

I don't think I could give any less of a shit about ray-tracing.

This looks amazing. Are you people nuts?

This isn't final build, by the way.

yes it is. graphics king right there.

Those textures are muddy as ****. And I don't see any benefit from the RT.

Baked lighting looks so good these days that real time raytracing does not seems like a worthy performance hit.

but this game will probably going to be better than Half life.

Looks amazing but that does not reflect the ray tracing I am familiar with.

And by familiar, I mean something I became aware of last week and read up on. So obviously I am a leading authority :P

Maybe we call it "ray tracing lite", now with more rays but less tracing?

We are a fickle people, us gamers.

Looks incredible. Gald I skipped Pascal for Volta, now it appears to be good decision.

I don't see a difference?

@mrbojangles25 said:

Looks amazing but that does not reflect the ray tracing I am familiar with.

And by familiar, I mean something I became aware of last week and read up on. So obviously I am a leading authority :P

Maybe we call it "ray tracing lite", now with more rays but less tracing?

@Pedro said:

@Gatygun said:

God this game looks rough. Hope this is not the final build.

The game looks rough? Gamers these days.

We are a fickle people, us gamers.

What has n64 goldeneye and gta 5 to do with the roughness of this game.

Look at the objects, looks almost cartoony so less poly's that it have. All objects look horrible in that house really. Textures are not as sharp as they should be, grass looks like a utter joke, tree's not moving even slightly behind it ( when they move out of the house ) corpses look horrible detailed.

The game just looks incredible rough, its understandable as it gets handicapped by original xbox one and ps4 hardware.

@mrbojangles25 said:

Looks amazing but that does not reflect the ray tracing I am familiar with.

And by familiar, I mean something I became aware of last week and read up on. So obviously I am a leading authority :P

Maybe we call it "ray tracing lite", now with more rays but less tracing?

@Pedro said:

@Gatygun said:

God this game looks rough. Hope this is not the final build.

The game looks rough? Gamers these days.

We are a fickle people, us gamers.

This makes zero sense.

Looks like a ZX Spectrum game.

only GTX TITAN V supports this ,nowaday

@Gatygun: I posted it as a reminder of what we used to get excited over, and what petty little shits we've become.

So it makes sense, at least to me, because when someone comes in and says/implies a game that's probably in beta (maybe alpha, who knows) looks bad visually, I find it kind of humorous but also depressing.

Anyway, don't take what I say too serious (or gaming in general, I mean why would you?), I don't come on here to not talk out of my ass half the time.

One of the best looking, upcoming, games and people her actually think it looks "rough" and "underwhelming". I smell trolling.

PC version is gfx king.

probably going to be another worthless gimpworks feature that tanks performance while offering minimal visual improvements

I'm actually really disappointed with the games graphics now...

@drserigala: It's worse but it will be \ worth it.

@Gatygun: yet god of war graphics are not rough at all.

^^ This... If you can get the same visual result by using less power why use the real thing?

Well... baked has tons of limitations doesn't it? At least I thought that anything that moved in baked light, or using any light source that moves (flashlight, vehicles) baked shadows/light don't work...

So changing the time of day smoothly, or having a light move around because it got hit by something, having large things that cast shadows move or get damaged, or having cars illuminate the surrounding realistically at all means you cannot use baked lights there. Or so I thought... It wouldn't really be the same visual result at all. Although the trailer didn't really showcase the benefits all that well imo.

There's loads of games now using a mixture of baked and real time stuff.

Horizon:ZD used backed along side real time lighting and that has a day/night cycle.

Ray tracing is the future but I wish people would just stop focusing on it as even future hardware will only have a finite amount of power and I would sooner they use it on other things.

There's not been a massive push for physics in game worlds over the last 10 years....... lets concentrate on that instead.

It's no use having photo realistic worlds if they don't interact and behave like one.

Why did you bump this 1 month old thread when you could've just make a new one to discuss this?

My NES has better ray tracing

Ah OK.

Well... They're never going to use it for cooler A.I.... Which is what I would have wanted. (Or is Rage 2 going to surprise me?)

Though Physics would be really cool too. Like if buildings in BF could crumble more dynamically. Create shooting holes. Have realistic rain that runs along the ground to form little streams if the ground gets too wet.

Or realistic sound reverberation and stuff. I remember a game in which sound around a corner or from another street would sound different. Think it was a WW2 game. It was impressive, because in most games sound doesn't really bounce or deform.

The game looks good...but what did the Ray tracing do to make it look better?!? It doesn't look different from any other amount of games coming out.

@davillain-: Is it against the rules here? I usually do on other sites too and nobody seems to mind,.. until now. Personally I think its better than starting a new thread on something that already exists.

no bumping old threads is correct